Art: A New Museum for an Ancient Art

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For openers: Louis Comfort Tiffany, glassmaker extraordinary

Glassmaking is one of the oldest of crafts: it was an estimated 3,500 years ago that some unknown artisan in Mesopotamia pulled a chunk of quartz from a primitive furnace and found that it had become the fascinating molten glob that is glass. There has never been a single museum detailing and displaying this long history. The Corning Glass Works has remedied the situation by opening a stunning new museum in Corning, N.Y., devoted to just this purpose. The building is worthy of its mission. It is an innovative and handsome structure designed by Architect Gunnar Birkerts, sheathed in paneled plate glass and laid out in the shape of a crazed clover leaf, a library in its center, a series of bays assigned to each of twelve major glassmaking styles.

The biggest bay is intended for special exhibits and, fittingly enough for the opening, it will be devoted to the work of the greatest of all U.S. glassmakers, Louis Comfort Tiffany. Specifically, it will celebrate 16 stained-glass windows that Tiffany treasured and installed in his lavish house in Oyster Bay, N.Y. The house burned to the ground in 1957, but somehow these windows survived and were bought by Hugh McKean, then president of Rollins College, and his wife Jeanette, a longtime Tiffany collector. With the windows, the McKeans set up a gallery near their home in Winter Park, Fla. Only after special pleas from Museum Director Thomas Buechner did they agree to lend the windows for Corning's opening.

In return, Corning has provided a richly tasteful installation of dark interiors, where each window glows, offering opulent testimony to the improvements in Tiffany's taste and technique as he grew in age and experience. The windows begin with panels that look like little more than paintings (not very good ones, mostly of the Burne-Jones persuasion) and go on to the increasingly abstract and incandescent color of Tiffany's later works, such as Pumpkin and Beets, 1900-05, as abstractly designed as any action painter might wish. Also on display is a solid representation of Tiffany's famed lamps and lampshades (one recently brought $360,000 at auction).

The designs range from the most familiar, delicate lacery to a remarkable lamp studded with bizarre, irregular pieces of brown-green glass. The result looks like nothing so much as a bejeweled turtle.

Not even Tiffany, who was a vain man, could have anticipated the surge in the value of his work. But then he did not intend to be a glassmaker in the first place. He did not need to be. When he was born in 1848, his father was already on his way to becoming the most famous jeweler in the land. But young Louis had no wish to take over the family business. He set out to be a painter, studying for a year with George Inness, rather than going to college. In the end he discovered that the arts and crafts movement founded by Britain's William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites was more to his taste; their creed was that everyday utensils and decoration should be formed and shaped by the same principles of beauty as any painting or sculpture. By the time he was 31, Tiffany had abandoned "pure" painting almost entirely to turn his talents to interior decoration and design, with a strong predilection for the Oriental simplicities and tastes preached by Whistler.